Open Source Development at the OpenHW Group

We encourage people to get involved and contribute to this project.

You can get involved in multiple ways:

file an issue (either against the RTL or the documentation - we consider erors in both to be bugs!).
ask a question.
generate a pull-request.
propose a derivative project.

As with any activity, we have our ways-of-working that help keep entropy under control. Specifically, we use git, GitHub and the Eclipse development process.

Git Development Workflow

Here is a brief description of the development workflow:

(Optional) Reach out and open an issue (or grab an open issue) for the feature you want to implement. The issue can be a great way of raising the attention and is also useful to track the implementation of certain features (which can go over multiple pull requests).
(Only once) Fork the repository into your own namespace using GitHub (you only need to do this once!). Configure the upstream remote.

Synchronize the remote fork and bring it up to date:

$ git fetch --all
$ git checkout master
$ git pull upstream master

Clone your forked repository (xxx is the username you have forked the repository to in step 2.):
```
$ git clone [email protected]:xxxx/core-v-mcu.git
```
Create a new branch for the feature/bug you want to implement/fix. Give the branch a meaningful name. You can also prefix it with feature or fix to make the intention more clear. For example if you want to add another CPU core you can name your branch feature/add-new-cpu. The name of the branch isn’t super important so you can also pick more concise names.:
```
$ git checkout -b feature/add-new-cpu
```
Git will have created this branch and switch to it. Start development.
Once you are happy with the contribution (or somewhere in between if you think it is worth making a commit), you can add the files to your staging area. For example:
```
$ git add file/i/ve/touched.txt
```
Commit the changes and add a meaningful commit message:
```
$ git commit
```
Push the changes to your GitHub fork.:
```
$ git push origin feature/add-new-cpu
```
Open a pull request using the GitHub interface.
Iterate on the pull request interface until all code quality checks are passed and the maintainer is happy with the contribution. You can simply change files and repeat step 7 - 9. Your pull request will automatically be updated and the maintainer notified.
The maintainer will merge your changes into the master branch. You can now finish and delete your branch (if you want). For the next feature go back to 3.

ECA and Signing Commits

We programmatically enforce signing all your commits and check your email against the Eclipse Contributor Agreement database. Be sure to sign-up with the right email address and add it to either the global or local repository setting. For example to add it to the local settings execute the following in the local repository:

$ git config user.email "[email protected]"

Optionally, you can sign your commits by using git commit -s.